Call me Ahab. On my third trip to Miami — the third trip of this still-young NBA season — the true nature of my journey emerges two minutes after take-off from Newark, when the chiming begins, way too soon. One of the crew has sniffed something — "an electrical odor," Captain Landry tells us. He will "vector" us back to Newark, where we'll land and sort it all out.

He is calm. I am calm. The Israeli woman next to me is not calm. She has phoned her husband, who pilots an F-15 for the Israeli Air Force; he suspects an engine fire.

"Will we be all right?" she asks.

"Absolutely," says I. "You're sitting next to me. And I am on a mission from God."

She laughs. She thinks I'm joking.

Captain Landry lands us gently. I point out to the Israeli woman the fire trucks racing alongside us on the runway. But there is no fire, only a change of planes. We're back in the air within an hour.

***

"(L)ike wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?"

That's Herman Melville, of course, from Moby Dick, Chapter 42, "The Whiteness of the Whale," wherein Herm invokes the terror wrought upon the human brain by a color whose color is an absence of all color "which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood."

But that's Ishmael talking, not Captain Ahab, the Pat Riley of the whaling game. What Ahab says — well, Ahab doesn't say much; Ahab acts, and unlike Riley, the President of the Miami Heat, who put the shiny NBA Championship rings he won as a coach into a bag and tossed them onto the table in front of LeBron James's dazzled child's eyes, and stole him from the Cleveland Cavaliers, Ahab never would've hauled down six figures a pop for a corporate motivational speech — what Ahab says, in essence and in deed is, "Fuck that shit."

I'm in Miami for a week, part of a season-long hunt — for LeBron James, the Whore of Akron; for the heart and soul of two cities, Cleveland and Miami; for the true nature and meaning of fanhood and of loyalty.

And I'm here to see me some basketball, too. The tri-starred juggernaut Riley hath assembled has been bitch-slapped twice already by the Boston Celtics, and also has lost to both New Orleans and Utah — to Utah after blowing a 22-point lead. Afterward, LeBron praised the Jazz coach and told reporters that he himself had been forced to play too many minutes.

Facing the Toronto Raptors, who enter the game with a record of 2-7, the Heat lead wire-to-wire. Toronto makes a couple of runs — this is the NBA, after all — but the result is never in doubt. Officially, the game is a sellout, but several thousand seats are empty. In Miami on Saturday night, the fiery hunt is elsewhere for most folks.

Not for me. In the Media Room — I have a press credential Saturday, a tenuous condition — long after the game, LeBron and Dwyane Wade take their seats onstage and field questions, mainly from the beat reporters, who must have a quote or two for their game stories. I am here to watch.

Nobody asks LeBron whether playing 39 minutes and 20 seconds is too much, too little, or just right. Nobody asks him about the Toronto coach, probably because no one can remember his name. It's a long, long season, the Heat are 6-4, and nobody wants to piss off anybody, least of all the kid glowering onstage, who took his talents to South Beach and left his smile behind.

--Click here to follow the @Scott_Raab journey on Twitter, and stay tuned for more reports all week...

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